v
Dr. Hall’s attitude toward educational theory and practice was derived from his special interest in child study. “In the nature of childhood itself and its different stages of development,” he says, “must be found the norm for all the method and matter of teaching.” One very general defect of our schools is that the teacher does not teach enough, but gives, or is required to give, too much attention to setting, hearing, and marking lessons. He thought the weakest spot in the American system to be from about the fourth to the ninth grades. Drill and authority can really do most with the child just at this stage. Whatever may be the possibilities eugenics offers in the future, it is a far-off future; for a long time to come we must depend on education to make the best of our child-material. Although it was necessary to exclude religious teaching from the schools, it should be restored as soon as a gradually widening tolerance makes that possible. Education without it lacks heart and soul. “Protestant though I am, I would far rather a child of mine should be trained to be a good Catholic, Jew, or even Buddhist, Confucianist, or Mohammedan than allowed to grow up with no religion at all and made an early skeptic toward all faiths. Not absolute truth but efficiency for the conduct of life is the supreme criterion of all values here. The highest interpretation of the most vital human experiences must always take the religious form.”
Motion pictures have more cultural possibilities, wrote Dr. Hall, than anything since the invention of printing; but we have not learned to develop them. Broadcasting may have similar possibilities; but the educational value of our newspapers has deteriorated.
The general problem of education as stated by Dr. Hall is somewhat as follows:
Over-population and a use of the earth’s resources so wasteful that we can now date the exhaustion of many of them are the first term of the problem. There is not now in the world one one-hundredth of the wealth necessary to satisfy the demand for it. “As civilization advances, it costs not only more money but more time and effort to keep people happy.” And “the average individual wants all that is coming to him now and here, and uses every means in his power (fair and sometimes foul) to get it. Thus he plunges on toward the bankruptcy of his hopes in their present form.” Wise minds realize that either men must restrict their desires, which is not likely, or must transform and redirect them—in technical language, must sublimate them, or find more internal surrogates for their gratification. Our industrial system is less than 200 years old. Our political institutions are only a few thousand years old. The mind of man is far, far older. Such men as James Harvey Robinson would adapt the mind of man to these juvenile institutions or phases of knowledge. Dr. Hall said the adjustment will have to be the other way about. It does seem likely. If it is to be made, psychology must make it.
“I know,” he wrote, “no class of men quite so hard-boiled and uninteresting and, indeed, unintelligent outside the hard and fast and often narrow limits of their own interests as the American millionaires. Each man has a normal amount of wealth as he has a normal weight of body on which he can best thrive. If I were sentenced to be rich now I should grow neurotic over insurance risks, problems of competition, fluctuation of prices and markets, labor problems, anxieties about special legislation, tariff rates, new fields of fruitful investment, and perhaps efforts to reform our present industrial system.”
In his own case, Dr. Hall found happiness through his work, which has never included that “curse of the industrial world today,” having to do, for pay, work that he hated. For it must be remembered that the false situation at Clark University was more than offset by the delight he had as a teacher of graduate students. But, work aside, perhaps the next greatest source of happiness and satisfaction to him has been the trait which Walt Whitman perfectly phrased when he exclaimed:
“In me the caresser of life, wherever moving.”
For this psychologist and teacher, who was also for some time president of the New England Watch and Ward Society, a voluntary censorship which asserts itself chiefly over books and plays and in opposition to the social evil, always had “a love for glimpsing at first hand the raw side of life. I have never missed an opportunity to attend a prize fight if I could do so unknown and away from home. Thrice I have taken dancing lessons from experts sworn to secrecy, and tried to learn the steps of ancient and some of the tabooed modern dances—just enough to know the feel of them—up to some six years ago, although I have always been known as a non-dancer.” In Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, New York and San Francisco he found guides to take him through the underworld by night. In an institution for the blind, he blindfolded himself for an entire day; he learned the deaf mute alphabet; he had seen three executions, visited morgues, revival meetings, anarchist meetings. Paupers, criminals, wayward children, circus freaks were among his hobbies. “I believe that such zests and their indulgence are a necessary part of the preparation of a psychologist or moralist who seeks to understand human nature as it is.” And as, probably, it will continue to be for a while to come.